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A comparison of wind stress datasets for the South China Sea

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Abstract

The wind stresses and their derived wind stress curls, and Sverdrup stream functions over the South China Sea (SCS) in typical winter and summer months from nine datasets are compared. The datasets include CCMP, CERSAT, ASCAT, QSCAT, NCEP, QSCAT-NCEP, HR, ERA-40, and ERA-Interim. Results show that the overall patterns of the wind stresses, wind stress curls, and Sverdrup stream functions from different datasets are similar. However, their magnitudes are remarkably different. Among them, ERA-40 is the smallest while HR is the largest. The former is about 40 % smaller than the mean value, while the latter is about 50 % greater than the mean value. The spatial resolution is important for the presentation of the wind stress features in the SCS. It can be expected that the same numerical ocean model driven by different wind stress would yield remarkably different results.

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Acknowledgments

The authors wish to thank Dr. Anthony C. Hirst and three anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments which greatly improved our manuscript. The present work was supported by the Ministry of Science and Technology through the National Basic Research Program grant no. 2011CB403502 and the International Cooperation Program grant no. 2010DFB23580. This study is also partly supported by the State Oceanic Administration of China through the International Cooperation Program of contract no. Y0213022.

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Correspondence to Zhan Lian.

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Responsible Editor: Anthony C. Hirst

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Lian, Z., Fang, G., Wei, Z. et al. A comparison of wind stress datasets for the South China Sea. Ocean Dynamics 65, 721–734 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10236-015-0832-z

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